I’ve been vaguely reading the Bubbles RSS feed for the past month or so. Bubbles aggregates a bunch of “small web”/”indie web” blogs, which sounds like it should give you a variety of diverse, interesting things to read: Original, different approaches to writing and design and etc etc etc, right?
I don’t want to be mean, but it’s not working.
The above grid is pretty representative, and it’s striking how uniform the blogs are. OK, I’m being unfair. While going through the newest entries in the feed, I removed a couple that didn’t use this template. But this really is what you’re going to see almost all the time if you’re reading these blogs.
How did all of these people arrive at the same design? Well, many of these “indie” blogs are hosted on Bear Blog.
And that’s the colour scheme they use… so everybody’s who’s hosting their texts there are using something similar? That is, a kinda desaturated bluish-gray background, and then text that’s also kinda bluish grayish, leaving you with a pretty low contrast page. I guess it’s supposed to be soothing? “Less distracting”? Demure. Making you concentrate on the text?
No menus… no images… no header… Just one (wide) column of text.
But apparently you can choose your own colours… and almost everybody has chosen colours that are within three degrees of the default ones? And while a lot of these are Bear blogs, many of them aren’t, and they’re still using the same design.
There’s a striking lack of images on these blogs, but that’s more easily explained: Most of them are written in Markdown, which makes it really easy and streamlined to write the text. But images are a totally different thing that you have to arrange separately, so it’s just too much work to casually drop something in there. So people don’t?
(Here’s where the Markdown blogger enthusiasts are going to say “but you just snap an image on your phone, and then drop it in Dropbox, and you just sign up for an AWS account, and then you put your image in an s3 bucket, and then you use the AWS command line tool to determine the URL, and then you paste that into your Markdown file, trying to remember the syntax, and of course, add a descriptive alt text. It literally couldn’t be easier”.)
What about the texts themselves, though?
Well, half of them are about how awesome it is to blog, and that everybody should blog, and rah rah rah INDIE WEB whoho! And also that you shouldn’t worry about whether anybody’s reading anything, because that doesn’t matter. JUST WRITE DAMMIT
I’m all for enthusiasm, but it’s starting to sound more like people are trying to will Something Interesting into happening, and that’s not really how things work.
But perhaps things will be different this time?
While typing away at this blog post, a Twitter user linked to this article about Camille Paglia on the Madonna blog (because of course it is). I just mention it because I was just struck by how diametrically opposite it is to the Bubbles aesthetic: There’s lots of images; several columns; stuff that moves; and black text on a white background.
Some of the Bubblers talk about how they absolutely can’t read anything if it’s like that… which I just find strange. But perhaps this is just the way people are these days? Can’t read a text if there’s anything else on the screen?
Anyway, here’s a picture of the neighbourhood cat as a reward for reading all that. Or if you just skipped down here without reading; that’s fine, too. In fact, that might well have been a better choice.